Cover Story: 'A good idea at the time'

Thursday

Ardian Preci moved to Worcester in 2011. An Albanian, he had been living in England. A couple years after settling in, he decided to join the ranks of property owners in the city, buying a four-family apartment building at 12 Lawrence St.

“It was cheap,” Preci recalled of the building he bought in 2013. “I thought it was a good idea.”

For Preci, it turned out to be anything but.

“I didn’t know much about the laws and regulations and how Worcester worked,” he said.

Preci’s lack of experience and unfamiliarity with the rules and laws turned what might have been a step toward the American Dream into a nightmare.

“I went through hell a couple years, moving tenants around, trying to fix stuff up,” he said.

Tenants who appeared to care little for where they lived, and even less about paying rent, proved especially troublesome.

“The notion of not paying rent at the end of the month is kind of foreign to me,” Preci said. “I’m a renter myself.”

“I think he got taken advantage of,” she said. “He bought the property with the occupants, which was certainly part of the issue.”

According to Preci, he let the existing tenants stay in their apartments.

“It was my fault,” he said. “They seemed like nice people.”

Instead, Preci said, he had tenants who would complain of problems in their apartment, then call the city on him. Rent was often not paid on time, and in one case, he said, a tenant who said they had one dog turned out to have seven.